Zadie Smith is there and not there. In the streaming image on my laptop she sits at a desk, backlit in her book-lined office, her right hand holding a goblet filled with liquid of such a dark crimson that it seems to suck all the other colors from the room. In the dim light Zadie’s face looks pale, the scatter of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose shifting around as if in no fixed position.

Circumstances have forced us to talk via FaceTime. It’s after midnight in London, where Zadie is; dark too where I am, in the attic of my house in Princeton, N. J. Despite the 3,000 miles of ocean that separate us, the illusion is that we are facing each other across our individual writing desks.

I don’t like FaceTime. The sudden projection into my presence of a staring, homuncular creature always feels strong and violent. It makes me anxious to have to talk to someone like this and pretend they’re real.

There’s another reason for my hesitancy to credit what I’m seeing tonight. I’ve just finished Zadie’s new novel, “Swing Time,” and am still living in its shadow world. Like the black-and-white musicals that feature in its pages, the book is a play of light and dark – at once an assertion of physicality and an illusion – in which the main characters, a girl born to a black mother and a while father, tries to assemble, from the competing allegiances that claim her, an identity that allows her to join the dance. This narrator is unnamed, as is the African country where much of the action takes place. The novel cloaks existential dread beneath the brightest of intensities.

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In spring 2011, when pro-democracy protests in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria were met with the crushing violence that would shape five years of conflict, a young French cartoonist in Paris decided to help some of his Syrian relatives get out.

At the time, Riad Sattouf was well known as a big talent on France’s thriving comics scene, drawing funny and scathing works of social observation. He had branched into cinema, winning the French equivalent of a Bafta for his first film The French Kissers, a nerdy take on teenage angst. From his comfortable life in Paris, Sattouf was convinced that Syria was going to be “completely destroyed”, so he went through official French state channels to apply for visas for some of his family members.

It proved so maddeningly difficult that he felt he had to write about it. But to write about it, Sattouf knew he would have tell his life story, which he had kept carefully shut away: his childhood growing up in Libya and Syria with a Syrian father and French mother, his parents’ divorce, his teenage years in Brittany.

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